Guild Wars 2

I just came back, after not playing for a while (for my own reasons). I just like that phrase used before the game came out. Play the way you want. As an ele, you can do this. You’ll probably suck, but you can do it.

You could also go for a flavor of the month build. Some people seem to think they work ok. I would say they just hit the sweet spot of a “lesser level of suck”. Ele has no good builds. Simple as that. They don’t. They do not. You can argue, but again, you are only hitting the lesser level of suck by comparison to the grand level of suck the class has to begin with.

I could ramble about health, or armor, or whatever everyone else is posting about the class these days, but that’s mostly whining. It doesn’t matter.

If you really want to look at the game is a serious light, lets look at all classes. Again, they all far into various levels of suck. This is very true. You could start yelling about warriors face rolling, or thieves invis. Whatever, its all a level of suck. If you look at their traits lines, they have just as many useless traits as eles do.

In fact, the devs could remove two thirds of the traits (pretty much any two trait lines completely from every class) and have minimal impact on the state of the game.

Why does half of this garbage even exist? Even if the skills or traits aren’t broken, most of them are generally so useless you are kinda left wondering “Why did I even bother using that skill?”…oh yeah…I remember, a filler for the next skill to be cast.

All classes suffer from this issue, not just eles. Eles just have the benefit of seeing it much more frequently due to having many (many, many, MANY) more useless skills to try and fill the void until an actual useful skill is off cool down.

As much as I like the phrase “play the way you want”, it doesn’t work. As an ele, i’d just be happy if I could play with the same quality of life as the other broken classes (ie: all of them).

I read a dev post, and I cannot for the life of me find the link, that eles only really shine with a full suit of ascended gear. Really? So the class generally sucks well past the end of the full story line, and well past the point of mostly being bored with all the rehashed content…then it gets to be a better(?) level of suck? A level of suck on par with the rest of the classes level of suck? The devs don’t see an issue with the way the eles stats are distributed after basically admitting they’re broken until the game is pretty much over?

So an ele requires a full suit of ascended gear to be a lesser level of suck. Ok…so are they with holding ascended gear from all the other classes so the ele can catch up to their level of suck? Nope…so once an ele has full ascended gear, proportionately they are still at the same level of suck below everyone else’s level of suck.

So back at the start, as I stated people are whining about eles armor and health. Hrm, after careful consideration, and a completely out-in-the-left-field comment by a dev, maybe they aren’t. Maybe the devs actually WANT the ele to suck this badly. On the bright side though, when they crippled mobility at least they didn’t go so far as to add an effect to our skills to constantly cripple us on use. Although, at this point, I can’t see that causing anymore harm than the consistant river of nerfs that keep flowing the eles way.

Most classes have problems in build variety, but most classes also have at least one very powerful build. Engineers’ turrets are ridiculously situational and often an awful choice, and their gadgets are often too much of a luxury to take over another kit. However, their condition spam, AoE, control and sustain are all extremely powerful. Warriors have the new healing signet, which has become a major cornerstone of many builds, and Rangers still have the spirit build which is good in a variety of situations. Those are just a few of the powerful builds I’m talking about. Warrior, Engineer, and Ranger all have problems, but they do have at least a few powerful builds.

I just don’t see that in the Elementalist, honestly. The devs weren’t kidding when they said this was the designated jack-of-all-trades class. We have long cooldowns on weapon skills, attunements having cooldowns, low base health and armor. But in return, we…don’t have the ability to burst someone down instantly, we don’t have the ability to rotate a series of blocks to avoid damage, we don’t have manual evades on our weapon skills, and we don’t have stealth. All of this combined absolutely forces us to build survivable in our gear and traits. 30 in Arcana for maximum protection uptime and quality of life for attunement swapping. 30 in water to reach the vit sweet-spot as well as contend with the terrible condition removal options the class has outside of the water traitline. We have, what, Ether Renewal and Cleansing Fire? And then maybe one more if you took offhand dagger. Good luck in the tanky condi meta.

Anyways, because elementalists aren’t allowed to easily specialize (due mainly to the attunement lockout mechanic: we can’t do things like air-fire-air-fire if we want a DPS rotation) most elementalists simply build for sustain so they can survive long enough to offset the stupidity of having to spam every cooldown in an attunement before moving on, since the lockout does not encourage intelligent skill use as the engineer’s kit mechanic does. It’s a real shame, since we have several extremely interesting utilities that are never utilized in heads-up PvP combat, such as glyph of storms, or the conjures. It’s always mist form and armor of earth.

Get out there and try to play without cantrips, without going into water or arcana. If you’re doing well, that’s great. Then ask yourself if you could do better for half the effort simply by playing…Any other class.

I’m not sure I entirely get this post, but in my experience if we’re sucky, then at least we’re starting to become less sucky with the recent changes. 30 Water for one thing, is no longer ‘mandatory’. 15 points is still useful, but that does give us 15 more points for something else. As for the cantrips mentioned, it’s been a long while since I used more than Armor of Earth on my skill bar and I don’t miss them at all.

I used to play a S/D ele in WvW for roaming(fresh air). I had decent HP(17k), good armor and nice dps stats(mostly ascended of course). The burst was enough to kill almost anyone within the first rotation, if that didn’t happen I could keep up good sustained damage. I rarely lost 1v1.
Then I tried sPvP with the exact same build and I instantly noticed the huge lack of crit damage required to make the build work. My burst was low, my sustained damage was nearly 0 and I felt like a shadow of what I was in WvW.
In sPvP I really don’t see any possible good builds that aren’t on a huge cooldown. That automatically makes them bad because of the downtime. The “standard” fresh air build (0/30/0/20/20 or 0/30/0/10/30) is terrible. Our bunker builds are bad when compared to other classes. There is no real working condition build. We’re left out of every possible role.
The “Jack of all trades” design is a huge failure here because everyone can do everything just like the elementalist but with less abilities. Take a S/D thief for example: they can have CC – infiltrator strike, basilisk venom, devourer venom, traps(lol… yeah traps and venoms), they have better damage, better gap closers, they also have some(mostly useless like ours though) conditions, they can selfheal(like every class in this game), they can run away better(stealth and shortbow for example), group support(shadow refuge… yeah it also needs a nerf xD) and they have better armor(not by a lot tbh but still higher base armor). They can do everything like us(except for the 1-2k AoE heals on a huge cooldown? very useful…) but they can do some stuff better. It’s like that with every class. Every class has some damage over time, direct damage, survivability, team support, CC and debuffs. What makes the ele the “Jack of all trades” when everyone has everything the ele has while they are allowed to do some things better than us?
The class design is flawed. It would’ve probably worked in an MMO with the trinity but here? It’s a complete miracle that the conjure damage still hasn’t been nerfed and we’re actually the top group DPS in PvE. Maybe the devs still haven’t noticed that…
The description of the class on the site would fit the game more than what they tried to turn it into. In case anyone’s forgotten what it is:
“Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.”
That last part is really not true in any form of PvP. Getting any decent damage requires spamming multiple spells and using instant casts while casting other abilities. The only reason that that is true about PvE is that you can stick mobs inside walls and use fiery greatsword to get out some great numbers(even lightning hammer’s single attacks aren’t so high, it’s the spam, AoE, blasts and blinds that make them so good).
Too bad that the devs never take any ideas from the class forums. I’ve seen some great suggestions that would bring a lot of build variety to elementalists.
I guess we’ll all just wait for the next balance patch and see what happens then. I just hope that we don’t get a necro patch v2 for eles.